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THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017
known as Cablegate, was perhaps the
most significant of the Manning re-
leases. The contents of the documents
had obvious news value---a secret bomb-
ing campaign in Yemen, or the massa-
cre of a family by U.S. troops in Iraq---
but, unlike with Manning's other
submissions, the richly detailed nature
of the material made the trove an en-
during resource for journalists, activ-
ists, and historians. Assange told me
that among his favorite cables was one
that documented how an independent
Kurdish TV station in Denmark be-
came a pawn among European coun-
tries vying for influence in . He
saw in the cable a clear expression of
Realpolitik at work.
For American o cials around the
world, the publication created immedi-
ate disturbances in delicate relationships.
Ecuador's leftist President, Rafael Cor-
rea, for instance, expelled the U.S. Am-
bassador over a cable that described high-
level police corruption there. In the
United States, political figures from
the two major parties delivered a fu-
sillade of criticism, with both Mitch
McConnell and Joe Biden calling As-
sange a "high-tech terrorist." Conser-
vative commentators on Fox News and
in the Washington Times called for his
assassination. Hillary Clinton declared,
"Let's be clear. This disclosure is not
just an attack on America's foreign-
policy interests. It is an attack on the
international community."
Meanwhile, the Justice Department
launched a criminal investigation,
seeking to prosecute Assange as a co-
conspirator to Manning under the Es-
pionage Act---a hundred-year-old law,
designed to prosecute spying, that the
Obama Administration had revived to
deter government whistle-blowing. A
grand jury was impanelled in Virginia,
and subpoenas were filed to obtain pri-
vate communications. Agents ques-
tioned people who were a liated with
Assange. Suddenly, the surveillance
that he often imagined was becom-
ing real.
The Espionage Act had never been
applied to a publisher, and with good
reason. Sources who leak classified se-
crets are breaking the law; they make
a judgment that exposing the informa-
tion is worth the risk of prosecution.
But an investigation that targeted
WikiLeaks would necessarily be based
on a di erent idea: that the act of pub-
lication was also criminal, a principle
that would inevitably interfere with
core First Amendment protections.
Many journalists---myself included---
argued against the investigation.
Whether Assange handled the Man-
ning releases well or poorly, his work
on it was not criminal.
The Justice Department, it turns
out, held the same misgivings about
the Espionage Act that journalists did.
"The biggest problem was what some
of us called 'the New York Times prob-
lem,' " Matthew Miller, a former Jus-
tice Department o cial, told me. "How
do you prosecute Julian Assange for
publishing classified information and
not the New York Times? I think it
went on for a long time because pros-
ecutors were hoping they would find
some obvious criminal act that could
support a charge, but it was evident
pretty early that, absent that, there was
no clear way to bring this case."Within
months, the department had quietly
allowed the case to stall.
Assange began to cast the Swedish
investigation as an extension of the
angry American response to his work.
"The Swedes, we understand, have said
if he comes to Sweden they will defer
their interest in him to the Americans,"
his lawyer, Mark Stephens, argued at
the time. "So it does seem to me what
we have here is nothing more than
holding charges." Assange refused to
return to Sweden, explaining that he
feared that he would be delivered to
the United States. The day after he
published Cablegate, Sweden issued a
European warrant for his arrest, and
the United Kingdom initiated proceed-
ings to extradite him.
The day that the arrest warrant was
announced, Assange sent me a mes-
sage with a smiley-face emoticon. "I'm
in my element," he told me. "Battles with
governments come easy. Battles with
treacherous women are another matter."
It was our first conversation about the
investigation in Sweden, and I asked him
what the case was about. "It perplexed
me to begin with," he said. "I understand
where they're at now, though." He spoke
of Sweden's "very, very poor judicial sys-
tem," weakened by external political med-
dling, careerism, and a culture of "crazed
radical feminist ideology." More import-
ant, though, the case was a matter of in-
ternational politics. "Sweden is a U.S. sa-
trapy," he said.
If you did not want to see Assange
involved in an ugly sex-crimes investi-
gation, the idea that the real issue was
geopolitics had an immediate appeal; in
, the British journalist and activist
Jemima Khan, an early celebrity sup-
porter, noted that the allegations were
"highly suspicious."
But Assange's argument made little
sense. The Swedish extradition process
requires the approval of the nation's Su-
preme Court; thus, the scenario that
Assange was proposing---a geopoliti-
cal plot to use his sex-crimes case as a
pretext to deliver him to the United
States---would require at least three
high justices to act as conspirators. If
this were not reason enough for skep-
ticism, under the rules governing Eu-
ropean arrest warrants Sweden could
not extradite Assange to the U.S. with-
out British approval; in other words,
shipping him to Stockholm would only
add a layer of bureaucratic obstacles for
Washington. In any event, Swedish law
prohibits extraditions for "political
crimes," which include espionage, and
for cases eligible for the death penalty.
Assange and his lawyers often raise
the possibility that he will be "rendered"
from Sweden to the United States. The
precedent they cite is an incident, just
after / , in which two Egyptian refu-
gees were detained by the Swedish se-
curity services and then turned over to
the C.I.A., which delivered them to
Egypt, where they were tortured. The
episode led to public outrage and a par-
liamentary probe, which concluded that
it had violated Swedish law. But, even
if the process were legal, Assange is not
a terrorist, and extraordinary renditions
do not deliver captives to civilian court-
rooms in Virginia.
I raised Assange's argument with
half a dozen former senior U.S. o -
cials---from the White House, the State
Department, and law-enforcement and
intelligence agencies---who were in a
position to know the details of U.S. pol-
icy on WikiLeaks. All said that they
knew of no plan to pressure Sweden. A
member of the Defense Department
task force told me that when the Swedes